Yet even this biography, for all its reach, does not fully capture James's originality: the melding of modern and antimodern sensibilities in his Modernist worldview, the profound differences between him and the other thinkers who took to calling themselves "pragmatists." In the suppleness of his thought, James was sui generis, then as now. He despised the intellectual hubris of reductionist explanation--how deftly he would have skewered the lumps of pop-evolutionary argument served up by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and how effectively the inquisitive title of his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" counters the pomposity of Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Nobody ever accused James of avoiding the tough questions.

James's intellectual openness underlay his radical empiricism. He took all sorts of experience seriously, including hallucination and despair. To be sure, there was something characteristically "American" in his discomfort with the past, his willed embrace of the present and future. Yet he never denied his own experience with suicidal depression; instead he mixed "life's bitterer flavors" into his mature worldview. If one friend said James was "born afresh every morning," another said it seemed "he had just stepped out of this sadness in order to meet you." James's own unresolved conflicts animated his philosophy. He resisted closure to the end. In his last published piece, he borrowed a phrase from "a pluralistic mystic," Benjamin Paul Blood, to serve as "pluralism's heraldic device." It was "ever not quite."

James's father, Henry Sr., would have flatly refused that motto. Insisting that "God is the only being in the universe," he was a thoroughgoing monist and Swedenborgian mystic--freed by his inherited wealth to pursue a life of endless travel and philosophical eccentricity. His lavish ways would soon exhaust the family money supply; William and his brother Henry would be forced to write for pay and cut the best publishing deals they could manage. (Both became pretty good at it.) But their childhood was privileged--a restless idyll of hotel rooms in New York, Geneva, London and Paris, and (for a few years) a house in Newport, Rhode Island, where William began to display his considerable artistic talent. The painter John La Farge was impressed, but not Henry James Sr. He wanted his son to follow the sterner path of science. The firing on Fort Sumter brought matters to a head. Henry Sr. did not want his eldest son to go to war, and William did not press the point. Though he signed up as a ninety-day recruit in the Newport Artillery Company, he never served in the Army. Despite Richardson's exhaustive research, we never learn how William avoided the draft when it was instituted later in the war. One assumes Henry Sr. hired a substitute. William's absence from the fight would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Instead of going to war he went to Harvard, "a small and stagnant place" in 1861 (as Richardson observes) but also the home of the Lawrence Scientific School, where James could pursue a course of study that would please his father. More important, the science curriculum, mediocre as it may have been, knocked some of the naïve idealism out of William, immersing him in the palpable, resistant reality of the material world. "What is real," he would later write, "always pushes back." Yet even as he confronted the irresistible power of matter, he also began to explore subtler forces, by following the research of Michael Faraday into electromagnetism. Perhaps it was from Faraday, Richardson suggests, that James derived his lifelong fascination with energy. If matter pushed back, energy rushed forward--and promised somehow to redeem matter from its inertia. "Matter is motion, motion is force, force is will," James would later write. Characteristically, he brought the categories down to the personal level, from abstract force to individual will.

But increasingly he was troubled by the specter of a merely material universe, where human actions were determined by chemical or biological circumstance and free will was little more than a convenient fiction. Traditional theism was no longer an option, even as it was defended by the charismatic star of the Lawrence Scientific School, Louis Agassiz--sworn enemy of Darwin who vowed to discredit the theory of natural selection by locating scientific evidence of special creation. James thought Agassiz was a brilliant teacher and even accompanied him on a specimen-hunting trip to Brazil, but in the end he decided Darwin had the better of the argument. What troubled James was not Darwinism but the broader set of materialist assumptions that characterized most scientific disciplines by the later nineteenth century. His decision to attend Harvard Medical School, which was committed to the practical side of medicine, plunged him more deeply into the realm of brute fact. In a world where mechanical causation was the only kind that mattered, James remained haunted by the fear that moral action was meaningless.

James took philosophical issues personally, even physically. In a universe empty of meaning, what was an honorable man to do? Since his Newport days, when he had struggled to paint despite his father's indifference, James had been tormented by mysterious and probably psychosomatic ailments--indigestion, back pain, eye strain. All these disorders persisted through the late 1860s and early 1870s, accompanied by immobilizing bouts of severe depression. As Richardson describes it, James fell into a pattern of crash, resolution, partial recovery, followed by another crash. The most memorable crash came in the spring of 1870; years later James recounted it (attributing it to a correspondent) in Varieties: "I went one evening into a dressing room in the twilight to procure some article that was there; when suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence." The fear merged with the image of a hopeless epileptic patient he had seen in an asylum, who "sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human." This vision of an Absolute Other (complete with exotic, imperial connotations) provoked a terrifying sense of kinship in James. "That shape am I, I felt, potentially," he remembered. "Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him." Seldom has the fear of non-being, of the loss of the self, been put so palpably. James had looked into the abyss, and the abyss had looked (blankly) back. What would now be characterized as a panic attack was for him an encounter with nothingness. As Richardson observes, the recollection of this experience helped to account for the hint of sadness in James's eyes that one sees in nearly every photo of him.

Still his emotional state remained labile, unpredictable. From time to time he glimpsed a way out. One such occasion was the death of his bright and spirited cousin Minnie Temple, at 24, from consumption. James was more than a little in love with Minnie, and her death was a crushing loss for him. But it also made him realize that we have to "ascend to some sort of partnership with fate, and since tragedy is at the heart of us, go to meet it, work it to our ends, instead of dodging it all our days, and being run down by it at last. Use your death (or your life, it's all one meaning) tat tvam asi." The last phrase, Richardson observes, is from the Chandogya Upanishad; James translated it as "that art Thou." The implication was that since the principle of God was common to both the cosmos and the individual, Minnie Temple's spirit was one with the spirit of the whole universe. It was "a sudden revelation," Richardson writes, "and not a Christian one." What began in an existentialist idiom ("use your death") ended in a mystical intimation of a larger life beyond individual human life.

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